Humans Make Terrible Robots. Thank God.

I Didn’t Realise Humans Were Becoming Robots Until I Looked at the Data…

Walking through contact centres, watching people mechanically repeat the same phrases and processes hour after hour, it became clear something was wrong. When I analysed call volumes and topics across different businesses, the truth hit me: we are forcing humans to act like robots – and they are doing a terrible job of it.

In sectors like utilities, local government, travel, and hospitality, up to 70% of customer interactions follow entirely predictable patterns. Only 30% actually require human judgement. Think about that. We are paying intelligent, emotional human beings to spend most of their day performing repetitive tasks that a machine could handle flawlessly.

The Staggering Cost of Human Robots

When humans carry out robotic tasks day after day, they become bored. Disheartened. Burnt out. For many, contact centre roles are not careers – they are stepping stones to something else. Their hearts are not in it, and that shows in customer interactions.

These repetitive tasks are not just monotonous – they are voluminous. Timely responses become nearly impossible. Customers spend an average of 42 days on hold annually. They wait more than 15 hours for email replies. Poor service costs businesses an estimated $10 trillion in lost customers.

Now, let’s put this in financial terms.

Take a mid-sized organisation with 1,000 employees earning an average salary of £33,000 per year. Their wage bill is £33 million. If employees lose 26% of their workday to repetitive, automatable tasks, that equates to £8.5 million wasted annually.

In terms of time, the picture is even worse. With 220 working days at 7.5 hours, each employee loses 429 hours a year to robotic work. That’s almost half a million hours lost across the organisation!

What Happens When AI Does the Robot Work

The transformation when businesses let AI handle these repetitive tasks is extraordinary. We’ve seen a 75% reduction in manual communication effort for a travel company, leading to a 10% increase in customer satisfaction. A social housing provider cut manual webchat replies by 50%. A local government automated 54% of waste collection enquiries. An insurance company replaced the work of five full-time agents with AI.

But the more fascinating change happens to the employees.

One organisation told us:
"We deal with complex issues like mental health, addiction, and dependency. I'd rather my team take the time to deal with these calls properly than answer endless queries that can be easily automated."

Another observed:
"Logicdialog gives us the opportunity to handle thousands more queries 24/7/365 in a cost-effective way, freeing up our front-line staff to deal with issues that really need a human response."

We’ve captured this transformation in a simple phrase: Let AI do the ordinary so your teams can do the extraordinary.

Humans Rising to Higher-Value Work

When freed from robotic tasks, employees evolve into AI managers, content coordinators, and knowledge experts. They use their product and company expertise to train AI systems, assess their effectiveness, and make necessary adjustments.

This elevates their work. Instead of mechanically repeating information, they apply their knowledge in a more strategic and sustainable way. As business needs change, they ensure the AI adapts accordingly.

We’ve seen contact centre agents progress within their organisations, even contributing to monthly AI reporting sessions with senior management. Instead of simply being the front line, they are now managing the front line.

This is higher-value work that prepares them for the AI-driven future ahead. It’s more fulfilling and creates natural career progression that simply doesn’t exist in traditional contact centre roles.

The Resistance and Misconceptions

Despite the clear benefits, we still encounter resistance. Many leaders believe chatbots are ineffective. They worry about implementation complexity. They assume customers only want human phone interaction. They think their existing portal or app is sufficient.

Increasingly, we also face concerns about hallucinations and data security with large language models and generative AI. These are valid concerns that need addressing.

But the bigger misconception is about the fundamental nature of work. Organisations have structured roles around customer issues – insurance claims, transaction checks, waste collection, housing repairs. The nature of these enquiries hasn’t changed.

What has changed is our ability to automate responses. Businesses have failed to implement effective self-service solutions, forcing humans to behave robotically during and after interactions.

My Vision for the Future Workplace

Five years from now, I expect far fewer people to be performing repetitive communication tasks. Former contact centre employees, with valuable institutional knowledge, will have transitioned into AI management and content coordination roles. They will be distilling their expertise into AI systems once, then maintaining that knowledge to ensure it remains current.

This represents a far more effective use of the vast experience they have gained on the front lines. The relationship with work will fundamentally improve, shifting from monotonous repetition to strategic knowledge management.

Will every contact centre agent become an AI manager? No. Progress always has casualties. But many of these roles were stepping stones anyway. The world has a way of recalibrating quickly.

More importantly, the people who remain will be doing work that truly suits human abilities – applying empathy, judgement, and creativity to complex situations. They will spend time on mental health cases rather than bin collection enquiries. They will resolve unique insurance claims instead of telling a customer their flight departure time for the thousandth time.

The irony is striking. We have created a strange world where humans pretend to be robots – and do it badly – while actual robots could handle these tasks perfectly. The cost is enormous: billions in wasted salaries, trillions in lost customers, and countless human hours spent on soul-destroying work.

The solution is simple: stop forcing humans to be robots. Let technologies like conversational AI handle predictable interactions. Free humans to be human – to solve complex problems, build relationships, and add value in ways that no machine ever could.

That’s not just good business. That’s good humanity.

“Logicdialog gives us the opportunity to handle thousands more queries 24/7/365 in a cost-effective way, freeing up our front-line staff to deal with issues that really need a human response.”